Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/537

 In June, the brother, who was in Ireland, was writing over sketches of rebellion as graphic as those he had received. He had gone up to Dublin, and found himself under martial law. There was no business doing, and every one had to be at their homes by nine o'clock. He accordingly left, and set sail for Wexford in a little sloop, and found every thing there in consternation. Only the night before some four thousand of the insurgents had assembled outside the town, and he relates, very graphically, the engagement between them and the two hundred men of the North Cork Militia, in which the rebels killed every one of the party but four. "I should have told you," he adds, in an oddly placed way, "that my mother is in Dublin. The whole country became later at their mercy, and Tom M'Cord and I, and all the Protestants, retreated into Duncannon; not that I was a bit afraid of our own people, for there was nothing they dreaded so much as being forced, through dire necessity, to join the insurgents." So he and Tom M'Cord sailed in a little sloop and got over to Wales. In his next, he begins that he takes up his pen "to write the saddest letter you ever did, or, I hope, you ever will, receive." He gives a little vignette from this bloody chronicle. "My Uncle Tom was killed at Arklow charging the rebels at the head of his troops; but now to freeze your very blood; my unfortunate Uncle Cornelius was surrounded and kept a prisoner in his own house by the rebels, when, in order to save his life, he supplied them with provisions; for doing which, when the army was victorious and retook Wexford, they tried him by a court-martial for aiding the rebels, and he was hanged this day week. John Coclough, of Craig, was also hanged; but he was always suspected of being a United man. William Hatten, John May, and many others are hanged, and, I suppose, all the papist merchants and gentlemen of Wexford also suffered. There were many Protestants, who, to save their own lives, were christened by a priest, and pretended to side with the rebels: such as my Uncle Cornelius, Tom Yokes, Tom Richards, and many more. The women were not injured anywhere, but were christened." His brother replied: "Judge of the horror of this perfidy that condemned the innocent, while two others were losing their lives in the service; but, my dear John, this is familiar. I fear the tears that we have already shed are not to be so soon dried, for the passions once roused to the point they are, mutual vengeance and ferocity produce long-continued effects." But, presently, the Irish brother had to write that he was in confinement at Dublin, for there had been "several attempts made by Tottenham of Ross and the Protestant ascendancy party to suborn witnesses to swear against me, but in vain." He had twice asked to be tried by court-martial; and Tom M'Cord, the owner of the sloop, was included in the same warrant, but had escaped to London. His vessel was seized and detained.

The exile travelling about the Continent took these disastrous events very philosophically. He was sure that justice would presently "rise from the troubled surf."

The Irish brother was at last enlarged, and, of course, after such an escape, returned a frantic loyalist. "I have been here," he writes, "three weeks, and can't bear almost to look out, on account of my meeting the villains of this place, for such a horrid set of hellhounds never inhabited any country; they were intent on nothing but blood and murder—the greatest savages of Africa or America were civilisation itself compared to them. You cannot, nor did I, conceive it possible that man could be so ferocious; as it was, B. Harvey Keogh and J. C. were repeatedly in most imminent danger, and Keogh was taken out to be piked."

A little scene in Dublin. "Last Monday I met Chas. Tottenham at Waddy's door. I told him he was the greatest rascal in Ireland, but I knew he would not take the notice of it a gentleman ought; he never made the smallest reply; and on the Friday following I met him in the same place, and told him the same story, when he mustered up passion enough to call me a rascal. I told him he should hear from me; but he was resolved he should not, for he went to Judge Downs himself and gave information, and that evening I was taken into custody and brought before the judge, and bound in six thousand pounds to keep the peace for three years." This abortive attempt at a rencontre is amusing, but the ingenious mode of giving a challenge, because the other was goaded into using the word "rascal," is highly characteristic. Here is a sketch of the two maidservants: "Katty and Kitty are at lodgings. Moll is at present at Solmestown, but she is to go to Tintern. She is fallen to drink again, and is not perfectly in her senses. Katty and she can't agree at all. Katty takes the drop sometimes herself, and then is rather saucy." The sale of a borough in these pure days, and the terms of sale: "It is at length sold to Lord Lismore and Sir William Meadows—acceptances for eight thousand pounds payable in ninety-one days, and five thousand pounds payable with interest in one year." We get glimpses of all sorts of strange arrangements, as "Lord Lismore wants to sell the corporation of Enniscorthy; he asks five hundred pounds, probably he would take four hundred pounds."

It was now the year 1806, so that the Lord of Tintern bids fair to become a regular foreigner. Nothing could draw him homewards, he was so absorbed in study and science. He was once more a détenu, for the war had broken out, and he seemed to have grown to dislike the notion of returning. He was devoted to his inventions. "Such pursuits," he wrote when they were pressing him to become a candidate for his county, "excite neither envy nor gratitude," which was something in the shape of an epigram, "and to them I owe my present tranquillity." For the silk manufacturers of a town memorialised the government, with the legal authorities of the place, that he should be allowed to reside on parole, an exception to the treatment of the