Chapter XXV: A Passing Visit to Killala (3)

At this moment the East is the El Dorado of European political hope. No single power dares to grasp it, but at last England and Russia will meet there, face to face, and the lion and the polar bear will shiver the desert silence with the roar of their struggle. It will be the return of the children to claim the birth-place. They may quarrel among themselves, but whoever wins, will introduce the life of the children and not of the parent. A possession and a province it may be, but no more an independent empire. Father Ishmael shall be a sheikh of honor, but of dominion no longer, and sit turbaned in the chimney corner, while his hatted heirs rule the house. The children will cluster around him, fascinated with his beautiful traditions, and curiously compare their little black shoes with his red slippers.

THE DANCING WOMEN OF THE EAST.

The Howadji entered the bower of the Ghazeeyah. A damsel admitted us at the gate, closely vailed, as if women's faces were to be seen no more forever. Across a clean little court, up stone steps that once were steadier, and we emerged upon a small, inclosed stone terrace, the sky-vaulted ante-chamber of that bower. Through a little door that made us stoop to enter, we passed into the peculiar retreat of the Ghazeeyah. It was a small, white, oblong room, with but one window, opposite the door, and that closed. On three sides there were small holes to admit light, as in dungeons, but too lofty for the eye to look through, like the oriel windows of sacristies. Under these openings were small glass vases holding oil, on which floated wicks. These were the means of illumination.

A divan of honor filled the end of the room; on the side was another, less honorable, as is usual in all Egyptian houses; on the floor a carpet, partly covering it. A straw matting extended beyond the carpet toward the door, and between the matting and the door was a bare space of stone floor, whereon to shed the slippers.

Hadji Hamed, the long cook, had been ill, but hearing of music and dancing and Ghawazee, he had turned out for the nonce, and accompanied us to the house, not all unmindful possibly, of the delectations of the Mecca pilgrimage. He stood upon the stone terrace afterward, looking in with huge delight! The solemn, long tomb-pilgrim! The merriest lunges of life were not lost upon him, notwithstanding.

The Howadji seated themselves orientally upon the divan of honor. To sit as Westerns sit is impossible upon a divan. There is some mysterious necessity for crossing the legs; and this Howadji never sees a tailor now in lands civilized, but the dimness of Eastern rooms and bazaars, the flowingness of robe, and the coiled splendor of the turban, and a world reclining leisurely at ease, rise distinct and dear in his mind--like that Sicilian mirage seen on divine days from Naples--but fleet as fair. To most men a tailor is the most unsuggestive of mortals; to the remembering Howadji he sits a poet.

The chibouque and nargileh and coffee belong to the divan, as the parts of harmony to each other. I seized the flowing tube of a brilliant amber-hued nargileh, such as Hafiz might have smoked, and prayed Isis that some stray Persian might chance along to complete our company. The Pacha inhaled at times a more sedate nargileh, at times the chibouque of the Commander, who reclined upon the divan below.

A tall Egyptian female, filially related, I am sure, to a gentle giraffe who had been indiscreet with a hippopotamus, moved heavily about, lighting the lamps, and looking as if her bright eyes were feeding upon the flame, as the giraffes might browse upon lofty autumn leaves. There was something awful in this figure. She was the type of those tall, angular, Chinese-eyed, semi-smiling, wholly homely and bewitched beings who sit in eternal profile in the sculptures of the temples. She was mystic, like the cow-horned Isis. I gradually feared that she had come off the wall of a tomb, probably in Thebes hard by, and that our Ghawazee delights would end in a sudden embalming, and laying away in the bowels of the hills with a perpetual prospect of her upon the walls.

Avaunt, Spectre! The Fay approaches, and Kushuk Arnem entered her bower. A bud no longer, yet a flower not too fully blown. Large laughing eyes, red pulpy lips, white teeth, arching nose, generous-featured, lazy, carelessly self-possessed, she came dancing in, addressing the Howadji in Arabic--words whose honey they would not have distilled through interpretation. Be content with the aroma of sound, if you can not catch the flavor of sense--and flavor can you never have through another mouth. Smiling and pantomime were our talking, and one choice Italian word she knew--_buono_. Ah! how much was _buono_ that choice evening. Eyes, lips, hair, form, dress, every thing that the strangers had or wore, was endlessly _buono_. Dancing, singing, smoking, coffee--_buono, buono, buonissimo_! How much work one word will do!

The Ghazeeyah entered--not mazed in that azure mist of gauze and muslin wherein Cerito floats fascinating across the scene, nor in the peacock plumage of sprightly Lucille Grahn, nor yet in that June cloudiness of airy apparel which Carlotta affects, nor in that sumptuous Spanishness of dark drapery wherein Fanny is most Fanny.

The glory of a butterfly is the starred brilliance of its wings. There are who declare that dress is divine--who aver that an untoileted woman is not wholly a woman, and that you may as well paint a saint without his halo, as describe a woman without detailing her dress. Therefore, while the coarser sex vails longing eyes, will we tell the story of the Ghazeeyah's apparel.

Yellow morocco slippers hid her feet, rosy and round; over these brooded a bewildering fullness of rainbow silk--Turkish trowsers we call them, but they are shintyan in Arabic. Like the sleeve of a clergyman's gown, the lower end is gathered somewhere, and the fullness gracefully over-falls. I say rainbow, although to the Howadji's little cognizant eye was the shintyan of more than the seven orthodox colors. In the bower of Kushuk, nargileh-clouded, coffee-scented, are eyes to be strictly trusted?

Yet we must not be entangled in this bewildering brilliance. A satin jacket, striped with velvet, and of open sleeves, wherefrom floated forth a fleecy cloud of under-sleeve, rolling adown the rosy arms, as June clouds down the western rosiness of the sky, inclosed the bust. A shawl, twisted of many folds, cinctured the waist, confining the silken shintyan. A golden necklace of charms girdled the throat, and the hair, much unctuated, as is the custom of the land, was adorned with a pendent fringe of black silk, tipped with gold, which hung upon the neck behind.

Let us confess to a dreamy, vaporous vail, overspreading, rather suffusing with color, the upper part of the arms and the lower limits of the neck. That rosiness is known as tób to the Arabians--a mystery whereof the merely masculine mind is not cognizant. Beneath the tób, truth allows a beautiful bud-burstiness of bosom; yet I swear, by John Bunyan, nothing so aggravating as the Howadji beholds in saloons unnamable nearer the Hudson than the Nile. This brilliant cloud, whose spirit was Kushuk Arnem, our gay Ghazeeyah, gathered itself upon a divan, and she inhaled vigorously a nargileh. A damsel in tób and shintyan exhaling azure clouds of aromatic smoke, had not been displeasing to that Persian poet, for whose coming I had prayed too late.

But more welcome than he, came the still-eyed Xenobi. She entered timidly like a bird. The Howadji had seen doves less gracefully sitting upon palm-boughs in the sunset, than she nestled upon the lower divan. A very dove of a Ghazeeyah--a quiet child, the last born of Terpsichore. Blow it from Mount Atlas, a modest dancing-girl. She sat near this Howadji, and handed him, O Haroun Alrashid! the tube of his nargileh. Its serpentine sinuosity flowed through her fingers, as if the golden gayety of her costume were gliding from her alive. It was an electric chain of communication, and never until some Xenobi of a houri hands the Howadji the nargileh of Paradise, will the smoke of the weed of Shiraz float so lightly, or so sweetly taste.

Xenobi was a mere bud, of most flexile and graceful form, ripe and round as the spring fruit of the tropics. Kushuk had the air of a woman for whom no surprises survive; Xenobi saw in every new day a surprise, haply in every Howadji a lover.

She was more richly dressed than Kushuk. There were gay gold bands and clasps upon her jacket; various necklaces of stamped gold and metallic charms clustered around her neck, and upon her head a bright silken web, as if a sun-suffused cloud were lingering there, and, dissolving, showered down her neck in a golden rain of pendants. Then, O Venus! more azure still--that delicious gauziness of tób, whereof more than to dream is delirium. Wonderful the witchery of a tób! Nor can the Howadji deem a maiden quite just to nature, who glides through the world unshintyaned and untóbed.

Xenobi was perhaps sixteen years old, and a fully developed woman; Kushuk Arnem, of some half-dozen summers more. Kushuk was unhennaed; but the younger, as younger maidens may, graced herself with the genial gifts of nature. Her delicate filbert nails were rosily tinted on the tips with henna, and those peddler poets meeting her in Paradise would have felt the reason of their chant, "Odors of Paradise, O flowers of the henna!" But she had no kohl upon the eyelashes, nor like Fatima of Damascus, whom the Howadji later saw, were her eyebrows shaved and replaced by thick, black arches of kohl. Yet fascinating are the almond-eyes of Egyptian women, bordered black with the kohl, whose intensity accords with the sumptuous passion that mingles moist and languid with their light. Eastern eyes are full of moonlight--Eastern beauty is a dream of passionate possibility, which the Howadji would fain awaken by the same spell with which the prince of Faery dissolved the enchanted sleep of the princess. Yet kohl and henna are only beautiful for the beautiful. In a coffee-shop at Esne, bold-faced among the men, sat a coarse courtesan sipping coffee and smoking a nargileh, whose kohled eyebrows and eyelashes made her a houri of hell.

"There is no joy but calm," I said, as the moments, brimmed with beauty, melted in the starlight, and the small room became a bower of bloom and a Persian garden of delight. We reclined, breathing fragrant fumes, and interchanging, through the Golden-sleeved, airy nothings. The Howadji and the houris had little in common but looks. Soulless as Undine, and suddenly risen from a laughing life in watery dells of lotus, sat the houris; and, like the mariner, sea-driven upon the enchanted isle of Prospero, sat the Howadji, unknowing the graceful gossip of Faery. But there is a faery always folded away in our souls, like a bright butterfly chrysalized, and sailing eastward, layer after layer of propriety, moderation, deference to public opinion, safety of sentiment, and all the thick crusts of compromise and convention roll away, and bending southward up the Nile, you may feel the faery fairly flutter her wings. And if you pause at Esne, she will fly out, and lead you a will-o'-the-wisp dance across all the trim sharp hedges of accustomed proprieties, and over the barren flats of social decencies. Dumb is that faery, so long has she been secluded, and can not say much to her fellows. But she feels and sees and enjoys all the more exquisitely and profoundly for her long sequestration.

Presently an old woman came in with a tár, a kind of tambourine, and her husband, a grisly old sinner, with a rabáb, or one-stringed fiddle. Old Hecate was a gone Ghazeeyah--a rose-leaf utterly shriveled away from rosiness. No longer a dancer, she made music for dancing. And the husband, who played for her in her youth, now played with her in her age. Like two old votaries who feel when they can no longer see, they devoted all the force of life remaining to the great game of pleasure, whose born thralls they were.

There were two tarabukas and brass castanets, and when the old pair were seated upon the carpet near the door, they all smote their rude instruments, and a wild clang rang through the little chamber. Thereto they sang. Strange sounds--such music as the angular, carved figures upon the temples would make, had they been conversing with us--sounds to the ear like their gracelessness to the eye.

This was Egyptian Polyhymnia preluding Terpsichore.

TERPSICHORE.

"The wind is fair
The boat is in the bay,
And the fair mermaid Pilot calls away--"

Kushuk Arnem quaffed a goblet of hemp arrack. The beaker was passed to the upper divan, and the Howadji sipping, found it to smack of anniseed. It was strong enough for the Pharaohs to have imbibed--even for Herod before beholding Herodias, for these dances are the same. This dancing is more ancient than Aboo Simbel. In the land of the Pharaohs, the Howadji saw the dancing they saw, as uncouth as the temples they built. This dancing is to the ballet of civilized lands what the gracelessness of Egypt was to the grace of Greece. Had the angular figures of the temple sculptures preluded with that music, they had certainly followed with this dancing.

Kushuk Arnem rose and loosened her shawl girdle in such wise, that I feared she was about to shed the frivolity of dress, as Venus shed the sea-foam, and stood opposite the divan, holding her brass castanets. Old Hecate beat the tár into a thunderous roar. Old husband drew sounds from his horrible rabáb, sharper than the sting of remorse, and Xenobi and the Giraffe each thrummed a tarabuka until thought the plaster would peel from the wall. Kushuk stood motionless, while this din deepened around her, the arrack aerializing her feet, the Howadji hoped, and not her brain. The sharp surges of sound swept around the room, dashing in regular measure against her movelessness, until suddenly the whole surface of her frame quivered in measure with the music. Her hands were raised, clapping the castanets, and she slowly turned upon herself, her right leg the pivot, marvelously convulsing all the muscles of her body. When she had completed the circuit of the spot on which she stood, she advanced slowly, all the muscles jerking in time to the music, and in solid, substantial spasms.

It was a curious and a wonderful gymnastic. There was no graceful dancing--once only there was the movement of dancing when she advanced, throwing one leg before the other as gipsies dance. But the rest was most voluptuous motion--not the lithe wooing of languid passion, but the soul of passion starting through every sense, and quivering in every limb. It was the very intensity of motion, concentrated and constant. The music still swelled savagely in maddened monotony of measure. Hecate and the old husband, fascinated with the Ghazeeyah's fire, threw their hands and arms excitedly above their instruments, and an occasional cry of enthusiasm and satisfaction burst from their lips. Suddenly stooping, still muscularly moving, Kushuk fell upon her knees, and writhing with body, arms and head upon the floor, still in measure--still clanking the castanets, and arose in the same manner. It was profoundly dramatic. The scenery of the dance was like that of a characteristic song. It was a lyric of love which words can not tell--profound, oriental, intense, and terrible. Still she retreated, until the constantly down-slipping shawl seemed only just clinging to her hips, and making the same circuit upon herself, she sat down, and after this violent and extravagant exertion was marbly cold.

Then timid but not tremulous, the young Xenobi arose bare-footed, and danced the same dance, not with the finished skill of Kushuk, but gracefully and well, and with her eyes fixed constantly upon the elder. With the same regular throb of the muscles she advanced and retreated, and the Paradise-pavilioned prophet could not have felt his heavenly harem complete, had he sat smoking and entranced with the Howadji.

Form so perfect was never yet carved in marble; not the Venus is so mellowly moulded. Her outline has not the voluptuous excess which is not too much--which is not perceptible to mere criticism, and is more a feeling flushing along the form, than a greater fullness of the form itself. The Greek Venus was sea-born, but our Egyptian is sun-born. The brown blood of the sun burned along her veins--the soul of the sun streamed shaded from her eyes. She was still, almost statuesquely still. When she danced it was only stillness intensely stirred, and followed that of Kushuk as moonlight succeeds sunshine. As she went on, Kushuk gradually rose, and joining her, they danced together. The Epicureans of Cairo indeed, the very young priests of Venus, assemble the Ghawazee in the most secluded adyta of their dwellings, and there eschewing the mystery of the shintyan, and the gauziness of the tób, they behold the unencumbered beauty of these beautiful women. At festivals so fair, arrack, raw brandy, and "depraved human nature," naturally improvise a ballet whereupon the curtain here falls.

Suddenly, as the clarion call awakens the long-slumbering spirit of the war-horse, old Hecate sprang to her feet, and loosening her girdle, seized the castanets, and, with the pure pride of power, advanced upon the floor, and danced incredibly. Crouching before like a wasting old willow, that merely shakes its drooping leaves to the tempest, she now shook her fibres with the vigor of a nascent elm, and moved up and down the room with a miraculous command of her frame.

In Venice I had heard a gray gondolier, dwindled into a ferryman, awakened in a moonlighted midnight, as we swept by with singers chanting Tasso, pour his swan-song of magnificent memory into the quick ear of night.

In the Champs Elysées I had heard a rheumy-eyed Invalide cry with the sonorous enthusiasm of Austerlitz, "Vive Napoleon!" as a new Napoleon rode by.

It was the Indian summer goldening the white winter--the Zodiacal light far flashing day into the twilight. And here was the same in dead old Egypt--in a Ghazeeyah who had brimmed her beaker with the threescore and ten drops of life. Not more strange, and unreal, and impressive in their way, the inscrutable remains of Egypt, sand-shrouded but undecayed, than in hers this strange spectacle of an efficient Coryphée of seventy.

Old Hecate! thou wast pure pomegranate also, and not banana, wonder most wonderful of all--words which must remain hieroglyphics upon these pages--and whose explication must be sought in Egypt, as they must come hither who would realize the freshness of Karnak.

Slow, sweet singing followed. The refrain was plaintive, like those of the boat songs--soothing, after the excitement of the dancing, as nursery lays to children after a tired day. "Buono," Kushuk Arnem! last of the Arnems, for so her name signified. Was it a remembering refrain of Palestine, whose daughter you are? "Taib," dove Xenobi! Fated, shall I say, or favored? Pledged life-long to pleasure! Who would dare to be? Who but a child so careless would dream that these placid ripples of youth will rock you stormless to El Dorado?

O Allah! and who cares? Refill the amber nargileh, Xenobi--another fingan of mellow mocha. Yet another strain more stirring. Hence, Hecate! shrivel into invisibility with the thundering tár, and the old husband with his diabolical rabáb. Waits not the one-eyed first officer below, with a linen lantern, to pilot as to the boat? And the beak of the Ibis points it not to Syene, Nubia, and a world unknown?

Farewell, Kushuk! Addio, still-eyed dove! Almost thou persuadest me to pleasure. O Wall-street, Wall-street! because you are virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale?

CURRAN, THE IRISH ORATOR.[3]

The next year after the exertions of Grattan had secured the independence of the Irish legislature, and just as the great question of reform began to loom up in the political horizon, there entered parliament another man, whose name is imperishably connected with the history of Ireland, JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN. Of a slight and ungainly figure, there was nothing about him to overawe a legislative assembly. Grattan was the Colossus of debate. Curran, like a skillful gladiator, played round the arena, and sometimes thrusting himself into the lists in the lighter armor of his wit, carried off the victory where his giant ally would have been less successful. But, in truth, this was not his proper theatre. He came into the Parliament-house in the evening, after having been all day in court. He was then jaded in body and mind, and chose rather to listen than to speak. As Grattan was most at home in parliament, Curran was most in his element at the bar. It was in the Four Courts that he rose above all other men; that he won the reputation of being the most eloquent advocate that Ireland had ever produced.

But it is on other accounts that Curran deserves a more minute sketch in this history. He represents, perhaps more than any of his celebrated countrymen, the Irish character--a nature compounded of imagination and sensibility. Though of less kingly intellect than Grattan, he was of a warmer temperament, and more fitted to be a popular idol.

Curran sprang from the people. He was born at Newmarket, an obscure town in the county of Cork, in 1750--being thus four years younger than Grattan. On the father's side he was descended from one of Cromwell's soldiers. Passing his childhood in the country, he was thrown much among the people. He loved to recall the days when he played marbles in the street of Newmarket, or assumed the part of Punch's man at a country fair. He loved to visit the peasantry in their cabins, and to listen to their tales. There he saw the Irish character--its wit, its humor, its sensibility to mirth and tears. There too, in those rough natures, which appear so sullen and savage, when brought face to face with their oppressors, he found the finest and tenderest affections of the human heart. There too he found a natural poetry and eloquence. He was a constant attendant at the weddings and wakes of his neighborhood. It was customary at that time to employ hired mourners for the dead, and their wild and solemn lamentations struck his youthful imagination. In after-years, he acknowledged that his first ideas of eloquence were derived from listening to the laments of mourners at the Irish burials.

When transferred to Trinity College in Dublin, he became distinguished chiefly for his social powers. Full of the exuberant life of youth, overflowing with spirits, and fond of fun and frolic, he was always a welcome companion among the students.

His mother had designed him for the church. When he came out of college, his tastes took another turn. But his mother never got over her disappointment at his not being a preacher. Not even his brilliant reputation at the bar and in parliament, could satisfy her maternal heart. She lived to see the nation hanging on the lips of this almost inspired orator. Yet even then she would lament over him, "O Jacky, Jacky, what a preacher was lost in you!" Her friends reminded her that she had lived to see her son one of the judges of the land. "Don't speak to me of _judges_," she would reply, "John was fit for any thing; and had he but followed our advice, it might hereafter be written upon my tomb that I had died the mother of a bishop."

But no one as yet knew that he had extraordinary talent for eloquence. Indeed he did not suspect it himself. In his boyhood he had a confusion in his utterance, from which he was called by his school-fellows "stuttering Jack Curran." It was not until many years after, while studying law at the Temple, that he found out that he _could speak_. After his fame was established, a friend dining with him one day, could not repress his admiration of Curran's eloquence, and remarked that it must have been born with him. "Indeed, my dear sir," replied Curran, "it was not, it was born twenty-three years and some months after me." But when he had made the important discovery of this concealed power, he employed every means to render his elocution perfect. He accustomed himself to speak very slowly to correct his precipitate utterance. He practiced before a glass to make his gestures graceful. He spoke aloud the most celebrated orations. One piece he was never weary of repeating, the speech of Antony over the body of Cæsar. This he recommended to his young friends at the bar as a model of eloquence.

And while he thus used art to smooth a channel for his thoughts to flow in, no man's eloquence ever issued more freshly and spontaneously from the heart. It was always the heart of the man that spoke. It was because his own emotions were so intense, that he possessed such power over the feelings of others.

His natural sympathies were strong. Like every truly great man, he was simple as a child. He had all those tastes which mark a genuine man. He loved nature. He loved children. He sympathized with the poor. It was perhaps from these popular sympathies that he preferred Rousseau among the French writers, and that his friendship was so strong with Mr. Godwin.

His nature was all sensibility. He was most keenly alive to gay, or to mournful scenes. He had a boyish love of fun and frolic. He entered into sports with infinite glee. In these things he remained a child to the end of his days; while in sensibility to tears he had the heart of a woman. Thus to the last hour of life he kept his affections fresh and flowing.

He had the delicate organization of genius. His frame vibrated to music like an Eolian harp. He had the most exquisite relish for the beauties of poetry. He was extravagantly fond of works of imagination. He devoured romances. And when in his reading he met with a passage which gratified his taste, he was never weary of repeating it to himself, or reading it to the friends who came to see him.

In conversation, perhaps the most prominent faculty of his mind was fancy--sportive, playful, tender, and pathetic. His conversation was a stream which never ceased to flow. His brilliant imagination, and the warmth with which he entered into every thing, gave it a peculiar fascination. Byron said that Curran had spoken more poetry than any man had ever written. In a circle of genial friends, after dinner, his genius was in its first action. His countenance lighted up, and his conversation, beginning to flow, now sparkled, now ran like wine. Flashes of wit played round him. Mirth gleamed from his eye and shot from his tongue. He had an endless store of anecdote, to which his extraordinary dramatic talent enabled him to give the happiest effect. He told stories, and hitting off the point of Irish character by the most exquisite mimicry; he "set the table on a roar," following perhaps with some touching tale which instantly brought tears into every eye. "You wept," says Phillips, "and you laughed, and you wondered; and the wonderful creature, who made you do all at will, never let it appear that he was more than your equal, and was quite willing, if you chose, to become your auditor."

The wit of Curran was spontaneous. It was the creation of the moment, the electric sparks shot from a mind overcharged with imagery and feeling. In this it differed from the wit of another great Irishman. Sheridan had more of the actor about him. His brilliant sayings were prepared beforehand. He aimed at display in the receptions at Holland House as much as when writing a comedy for Drury-lane.

Perhaps no foreigner, who has visited England, has had a better opportunity of seeing its distinguished men than Madame De Stael. She was constantly surrounded by the most brilliant society of London. Yet even in that blaze of genius, she was most struck, as she often told her friends, with the conversational powers of Curran. This too, was in 1813, when his health had sunk, and his spirits were so depressed, as to make it an effort to support his part at all in society.

From the vivacity of his conversation, one would hardly have suspected the depth and seriousness of his character. In talking with ladies or with young persons, his mind was remarkable for its constant playfulness. A gleam of sunshine illumined his whole being. Yet those who knew him intimately were aware that he was subject all his life to constitutional melancholy. Like many other men celebrated for their wit, his gayety alternated with deep depression. The truth was that he sympathized too intensely with the scenes of real life, to be uniformly gay. In his country he saw so much to sadden him, that his feelings took a melancholy tone. The transition was often instantaneous from humor to pathos. His friends, who saw him in his lighter moods, were surprised at the sudden change of his countenance. "In grave conversation, his voice was remarkable for a certain plaintive sincerity of tone"--a sadness which fascinated the listener like mournful music.

In his eloquence appeared the same transitions of feeling and variety of talent. He could descend to the dryest details of law or evidence. Thomas Addis Emmet, who, though younger, practiced at the same bar, says that Curran possessed a logical head. From this he could rise to the highest flights of imagination, and it was here, and in appeals to the feelings, that he was most at home. Sometimes his wit ran away with him. His fancy was let off like a display of fireworks. It flew like a thousand rockets, darting, whizzing, buzzing, lighting up the sky with fantastic shapes.

By turns he could use the lightest or the heaviest weapon, as suited the object of his attack. Where ethereal wit or playful irony were likely to be thrown away upon some gross and insensible subject, he could point the keenest edge of ridicule, or the coarsest invective, or the most withering sarcasm.

When dissecting the character of a perjured witness, he seemed to delight in making him feel the knife. His victim, at such a time, appeared like an insect whom he had lanced with a needle, and was holding up to the laughter and scorn of the world. Thus, when treating the evidence of O'Brien, a hired informer, who had come on the stand to swear away the lives of men whom the government had determined to sacrifice, Curran apostrophized the patriotic individual, "Dearest, sweetest, Mr. James O'Brien," exposing the utter rottenness of his character in a tone of irony, until the man, who had a forehead of brass, was forced to slink back into the crowd, and to escape from the court.

So in his place in parliament, when exposing the corruption of the officers of government, he did not spare nor have pity. A swarm of blood-suckers had fastened on the state, who were growing fat from draining the life of their unhappy country. Curran proclaimed the immaculate virtue of "those saints on the pension list, that are like lilies of the field--they toil not, neither do they spin, but they are arrayed like Solomon in his glory." The extent to which this corruption had gone was incredible. "This polyglot of wealth," said Curran, "this museum of curiosities, the pension list, embraces every link in the human chain, every description of men, women, and children, from the exalted excellence of a Hawke or a Rodney, to the debased situation of the lady who humbleth herself that she may be exalted." The road to advancement at that day in Ireland, to the peerage, to the judicial bench, was to betray the country. Curran branded those who thus came into power by one of the strongest figures in English eloquence. "Those foundlings of fortune, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies, while soundness or sanity remained in them; but at length becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror, and contagion, and abomination."

At the bar he often indulged in sallies of wit, and thus conciliated the attention of the court. His delicate satire, his comical turns of thought, convulsed the court with laughter. Then suddenly he stopped, his lip quivered, his sentences grew slow and measured, and he poured forth strains of the deepest pathos, as he pictured the wrongs of his country, or lamented the companions of other days, the illustrious departed, "over whose ashes the most precious tears of Ireland had been shed." His voice excelled in the utterance of plaintive emotions, and the homage which had been paid to his eloquence by mirth, was now paid in the sound of suppressed weeping, which alone broke the death-like stillness of the room. In pleading for one on trial for his life, his voice subsided toward the close and sunk away in tones of solemnity and supplication. Thus would he say, "Sweet is the recollection of having done justice in that hour when the hand of death presses on the human heart! Sweet is the hope which it gives birth to! From you I demand that justice for my client, your innocent and unfortunate fellow-subject at the bar; and may you have it for a more lasting reward than the perishable crown we read of, which the ancients placed on the brow of him who saved in battle the life of a fellow-citizen!"

But the trait which appears most conspicuous in the public efforts of Curran, and which made him the idol of his countrymen, was his enthusiastic love of Ireland. Says his biographer, "Ireland was the choice of his youth, and was from first to last regarded by him, not so much with the feelings of a patriot, as with the romantic idolatry of a lover." In early life he had learned to love the Irish peasantry, and no lapse of time could chill his affection. No temptation of office could seduce him from the side of the poor and the oppressed. He knew their noble qualities, and his bosom burned at the wrongs which they suffered.

One of his first causes at the bar was pleading for a Catholic priest who had been brutally assaulted by a nobleman. Such was the fear of incurring the displeasure of a lord, that no one dared to undertake the prosecution, until Curran stepped forward, then a young lawyer. His effort was successful. Not long after, the priest was called away from the world. He sent for Curran to his bedside. Gold and silver he had none. But he gave him all in his power, the benediction of a dying man. He caused himself to be raised up in his bed, and stretching out his trembling hands to place them upon the head of the defender, invoked for him the blessing of the Almighty. Such scenes as this, while they excited the enthusiasm of the Catholic population throughout Ireland for the young advocate, who had dared to defend a priest of their proscribed religion, at the same time strengthened his determination to make common cause with his countrymen in their sufferings.

It is melancholy to reflect that efforts so great for the liberty and happiness of Ireland, were not crowned with complete success. But the patriotism and the courage were not less noble because overborne by superior power. It is the honor of Curran that he loved Ireland in her woe, and loved her to the last. Toward the close of life he said, "To our unhappy country, what I had, I gave. I might have often sold her. I could not redeem her. I gave her the best sympathies of my heart, sometimes in tears, sometimes in indignation, sometimes in hope, but often in despondence."

FOOTNOTE:

[3] From the "Irish Confederates," by _Henry M. Field_, in the press of Harper and Brothers.

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

GHOST STORIES OF CHAPELIZOD.

Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror. You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins. Now, although this class of inhabitants are in nowise amenable to the police authorities, yet as their demeanor greatly affects the comforts of her Majesty's subjects, I can not but regard it as a grave omission that the public have hitherto been left without any statistical returns of their numbers, activity, &c., &c. And I am persuaded that a Commission to inquire into and report upon the numerical strength, habits, haunts, &c., &c., of supernatural agents resident in Ireland, would be a great deal more innocent and entertaining than half the Commissions for which the country pays, and at least as instructive. This I say more from a sense of duty, and to deliver my mind of a grave truth than with any hope of seeing the suggestion adopted. But, I am sure, my readers will deplore with me that the comprehensive powers of belief, and apparently illimitable leisure, possessed by parliamentary commissions of inquiry, should never have been applied to the subject I have named, and that the collection of that species of information should be confided to the gratuitous and desultory labors of individuals, who, like myself, have other occupations to attend to. This, however, by the way.

Among the village outposts of Dublin, Chapelizod once held a considerable, if not a foremost rank. Without mentioning its connection with the history of the great Kilmainham Preceptory of the Knights of St. John, it will be enough to remind the reader of its ancient and celebrated castle, not one vestige of which now remains, and of the fact that it was for, we believe, some centuries, the summer residence of the Viceroys of Ireland. The circumstance of its being up, we believe, to the period at which that corps was disbanded, the head-quarters of the Royal Irish Artillery, gave it also a consequence of an humbler, but not less substantial kind. With these advantages in its favor, it is not wonderful that the town exhibited at one time an air of substantial and semi-aristocratic prosperity unknown to Irish villages in modern times.

A broad street, with a well-paved foot-path, and houses as lofty as were at that time to be found in the fashionable streets of Dublin; a goodly stone-fronted barrack; an ancient church, vaulted beneath, and with a tower clothed from its summit to its base with the richest ivy; an humble Roman Catholic chapel; a steep bridge spanning the Liffey, and a great old mill at the near end of it, were the principal features of the town. These, or at least most of them, remain, but still the greater part in a very changed and forlorn condition. Some of them indeed superseded, though not obliterated by modern erections, such as the bridge, the chapel, and the church in part; the rest forsaken by the order who originally raised them, and delivered up to poverty, and in some cases to absolute decay.

The village lies in the lap of the rich and wooded valley of the Liffey, and is overlooked by the high grounds of the beautiful Phoenix Park on the one side, and by the ridge of the Palmerstown hills on the other. Its situation, therefore is eminently picturesque; and factory fronts and chimneys notwithstanding, it has, I think, even in its decay, a sort of melancholy picturesqueness of its own. Be that as it may, I mean to relate two or three stories of that sort, which may be read with very good effect by a blazing fire on a shrewd winter's night, and are all directly connected with the altered and somewhat melancholy little town I have named. The first I shall relate concerns

THE VILLAGE BULLY.

About thirty years ago there lived in the town of Chapelizod an ill-conditioned fellow of Herculean strength, well known throughout the neighborhood by the title of Bully Larkin. In addition to his remarkable physical superiority, this fellow had acquired a degree of skill as a pugilist which alone would have made him formidable. As it was, he was the autocrat of the village, and carried not the sceptre in vain. Conscious of his superiority, and perfectly secure of impunity, he lorded it over his fellows in a spirit of cowardly and brutal insolence, which made him hated even more profoundly than he was feared.

Upon more than one occasion he had deliberately forced quarrels upon men whom he had singled out for the exhibition of his savage prowess; and, in every encounter his overmatched antagonist had received an amount of "punishment" which edified and appalled the spectators, and in some instances left ineffaceable scars and lasting injuries after it.

Bully Larkin's pluck had never been fairly tried. For, owing to his prodigious superiority in weight, strength, and skill, his victories had always been certain and easy; and in proportion to the facility with which he uniformly smashed an antagonist, his pugnacity and insolence were inflamed. He thus became an odious nuisance in the neighborhood, and the terror of every mother who had a son, and of every wife who had a husband who possessed a spirit to resent insult, or the smallest confidence in his own pugilistic capabilities.

Now it happened that there was a young fellow named Ned Moran--better known by the _soubriquet_ of "Long Ned," from his slender, lathy proportions--at that time living in the town. He was, in truth, a mere lad, nineteen years of age, and fully twelve years younger than the stalwart bully. This, however, as the reader will see, secured for him no exemption from the dastardly provocations of the ill-conditioned pugilist. Long Ned, in an evil hour, had thrown eyes of affection upon a certain buxom damsel, who, notwithstanding Bully Larkin's amorous rivalry, inclined to reciprocate them.

I need not say how easily the spark of jealousy, once kindled, is blown into a flame, and how naturally, in a coarse and ungoverned nature, it explodes in acts of violence and outrage.

"The bully" watched his opportunity, and contrived to provoke Ned Moran, while drinking in a public-house with a party of friends, into an altercation, in the course of which he failed not to put such insults upon his rival as manhood could not tolerate. Long Ned, though a simple, good-natured sort of fellow, was by no means deficient in spirit, and retorted in a tone of defiance which edified the more timid, and gave his opponent the opportunity he secretly coveted.

Bully Larkin challenged the heroic youth, whose pretty face he had privately consigned to the mangling and bloody discipline he was himself so capable of administering. The quarrel, which he had himself contrived to get up, to a certain degree covered the ill-blood and malignant premeditation which inspired his proceedings, and Long Ned, being full of generous ire and whisky punch, accepted the gage of battle on the instant. The whole party, accompanied by a mob of idle men and boys, and in short, by all who could snatch a moment from the calls of business, proceeded in slow procession through the old gate into the Phoenix Park, and mounting the hill overlooking the town, selected near its summit a level spot on which to decide the quarrel.

The combatants stripped, and a child might have seen in the contrast presented by the slight, lank form and limbs of the lad, and the muscular and massive build of his veteran antagonist, how desperate was the chance of poor Ned Moran.

"Seconds" and "bottle-holders"--selected, of course, for their love of the game--were appointed, and "the fight" commenced.

I will not shock my readers with a description of the cool-blooded butchery that followed. The result of the combat was what any body might have predicted. At the eleventh round, poor Ned refused to "give in;" the brawny pugilist, unhurt, in good wind, and pale with concentrated, and as yet, unslaked revenge, had the gratification of seeing his opponent seated upon his second's knee, unable to hold up his head, his left arm disabled; his face a bloody, swollen, and shapeless mass; his breast scarred and bloody, and his whole body panting and quivering with rage and exhaustion.

"Give in Ned, my boy," cried more than one of the by-standers.

"Never, never," shrieked he, with a voice hoarse and choking.

Time being "up," his second placed him on his feet again. Blinded with his own blood, panting and staggering, he presented but a helpless mark for the blows of his stalwart opponent. It was plain that a touch would have been sufficient to throw him to the earth. But Larkin had no notion of letting him off so easily. He closed with him without striking a blow (the effect of which, prematurely dealt, would have been to bring him at once to the ground, and so put an end to the combat), and getting his battered and almost senseless head under his arm, fast in that peculiar "fix" known to the fancy pleasantly by the name of "chancery," he held him firmly, while with monotonous and brutal strokes, he beat his fist, as it seemed, almost into his face. A cry of "shame" broke from the crowd, for it was plain that the beaten man was now insensible, and supported only by the Herculean arm of the bully. The round and the fight ended by his hurling him upon the ground, falling upon him at the same time, with his knee upon his chest.

The bully rose, wiping the perspiration from his white face with his blood-stained hands, but Ned lay stretched and motionless upon the grass. It was impossible to get him upon his legs for another round. So he was carried down, just as he was, to the pond which then lay close to the old Park gate, and his head and body were washed beside it. Contrary to the belief of all, he was not dead. He was carried home, and after some months, to a certain extent, recovered. But he never held up his head again, and before the year was over he had died of consumption. Nobody could doubt how the disease had been induced, but there was no actual proof to connect the cause and effect, and the ruffian Larkin escaped the vengeance of the law. A strange retribution, however, awaited him.

After the death of Long Ned, he became less quarrelsome than before, but more sullen and reserved. Some said, "he took it to heart," and others, that his conscience was not at ease about it. Be this as it may, however, his health did not suffer by reason of his presumed agitations, nor was his worldly prosperity marred by the blasting curses with which poor Moran's enraged mother pursued him; on the contrary, he had rather risen in the world, and obtained regular and well-remunerated employment from the Chief-secretary's gardener, at the other side of the Park. He still lived in Chapelizod, whither, on the close of his day's work, he used to return across the Fifteen Acres.

It was about three years after the catastrophe we have mentioned, and late in the autumn, when, one night, contrary to his habit, he did not appear at the house where he lodged, neither had he been seen any where, during the evening, in the village. His hours of return had been so very regular, that his absence excited considerable surprise, though, of course, no actual alarm; and, at the usual hour, the house was closed for the night, and the absent lodger consigned to the mercy of the elements, and the care of his presiding star. Early in the morning, however, he was found lying in a state of utter helplessness upon the slope immediately overlooking the Chapelizod gate. He had been smitten with a paralytic stroke; his right side was dead; and it was many weeks before he had recovered his speech sufficiently to make himself at all understood.

He then made the following relation: he had been detained, it appeared, later than usual, and darkness had closed in before he commenced his homeward walk across the Park. It was a moonlight night, but masses of ragged clouds were slowly drifting across the heavens. He had not encountered a human figure, and no sounds but the softened rush of the wind sweeping through bushes and hollows, met his ear. These wild and monotonous sounds, and the utter solitude which surrounded him, did not, however, excite any of those uneasy sensations which are ascribed to superstition, although he said he did feel depressed, or, in his own phraseology, "lonesome." Just as he crossed the brow of the hill which shelters the town of Chapelizod, the moon shone out for some moments with unclouded lustre, and his eye, which happened to wander by the shadowy inclosures which lay at the foot of the slope, was arrested by the sight of a human figure climbing, with all the haste of one pursued, over the church-yard wall, and running up the steep ascent directly toward him. Stories of "resurrectionists" crossed his recollection, as he observed this suspicious-looking figure. But he began, momentarily, to be aware, with a sort of fearful instinct which he could not explain, that the running figure was directing his steps, with a sinister purpose, toward himself.

The form was that of a man with a loose coat about him, which, as he ran, he disengaged, and as well as Larkin could see, for the moon was again wading in clouds, threw from him. The figure thus advanced until within some two score yards of him; it arrested its speed, and approached, with a loose, swaggering gait. The moon again shone out bright and clear, and, gracious God! what was the spectacle before him? He saw as distinctly as if he had been presented there in the flesh, Ned Moran, himself, stripped naked from the waist upward, as if for pugilistic combat, and drawing toward him in silence. Larkin would have shouted, prayed, cursed, fled across the Park, but he was absolutely powerless; the apparition stopped within a few steps, and leered on him with a ghastly mimicry of the defiant stare with which pugilists strive to cow one another before combat. For a time, which he could not so much as conjecture, he was held in the fascination of that unearthly gaze, and at last the thing, whatever it was, on a sudden swaggered close up to him with extended palms. With an impulse of horror, Larkin put out his hand to keep the figure off, and their palms touched--at least, so he believed--for a thrill of unspeakable agony, running through his arm, pervaded his entire frame, and he fell senseless to the earth.

Though Larkin lived for many years after, his punishment was terrible. He was incurably maimed; and being unable to work, he was forced, for existence, to beg alms of those who had once feared and flattered him. He suffered, too, increasingly, under his own horrible interpretation of the preternatural encounter which was the beginning of all his miseries. It was vain to endeavor to shake his faith in the reality of the apparition, and equally vain, as some compassionately did, to try to persuade him that the greeting with which his vision closed, was intended, while inflicting a temporary trial, to signify a compensating reconciliation.

"No, no," he used to say, "all won't do. I know the meaning of it well enough; it is a challenge to meet him in the other world--in Hell, where I am going--that's what it means, and nothing else."

And so, miserable and refusing comfort, he lived on for some years, and then died, and was buried in the same narrow church-yard which contains the remains of his victim.

I need hardly say how absolute was the faith of the honest inhabitants, at the time when I heard the story, in the reality of the preternatural summons which, through the portals of terror, sickness, and misery, had summoned Bully Larkin to his long, last home, and that, too, upon the very ground on which he had signalized the guiltiest triumph of his violent and vindictive career.

I recollect another story of the preternatural sort, which made no small sensation, some five-and-thirty years ago, among the good gossips of the town; and, with your leave, courteous reader, I shall relate it.

THE SEXTON'S ADVENTURE.