Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 35.djvu/342

 cry was roused by the judges and lawyers, who abhor the proposition that the heretical king is not a legitimate sovereign, because this would bring overwhelming ruin on all who hold ecclesiastical property from him.’ Complaints of Mahony's book were lodged at Lisbon by an English priest (perhaps John Serjeant). King John condemned it in December 1647, and it was made penal to possess a copy (, i. 739). The author is described as ‘Constantine Mahun, an Irishman … of the Company of Jesus called Cornelius of St. Patrick.’ In the National Congregation of the Roman catholic clergy held in Dublin in June 1666, Walsh procured a unanimous decision in favour of burning the ‘Apologia,’ but it may be doubted whether this was done. 

MAHONY, FRANCIS SYLVESTER, best known by his pseudonym of (1804–1866), humorist, born at Cork in 1804, was second son of Martin Mahony, a woollen manufacturer, whose factory at Blarney still flourishes. His mother was Mary Reynolds. He claimed descent from an old Irish family, the O'Mahonies of Dromore Castle, co. Kerry. After attending the jesuits' college at Clongoweswood, co. Kildare, he and a brother Nicholas entered the jesuits' college of St. Acheul at Amiens in 1812. Determining to become a jesuit, in spite of his father's desire that he should go to the bar, Francis was soon transferred to the seminary in the Rue de Sèvres in Paris, and having spent his two years' novitiate there or at the country house of the seminary at Montrouge, he proceeded to the jesuits' college at Rome. In due course he was admitted to the order. His remarkable facility in writing Latin verse and prose, and in speaking Latin, attracted the notice of his teachers at an early period, but an impatience of discipline roused doubts in the minds of his superiors as to his fitness for his vocation. The Abbé Martial Marcet de la Roché-Arnaud, an enemy of the jesuits, who seems to have met him and other jesuit students at Rome, credited him, on the other hand, in his ‘Les Jésuites Modernes,’ Paris, 1826, with all ‘the fanaticism, the dissimulation, the intrigue, and the chicanery’ usually deemed jesuitical characteristics. In August 1830 Mahony was appointed prefect of studies at the jesuits' college at Clongoweswood, and in October he was promoted to be master of rhetoric. His pupils included John Sheehan a well-known writer under the pseudonym of ‘The Irish Whisky-Drinker,’ and Francis Stack (afterwards Serjeant) Murphy. In November Mahony accompanied his pupils on a coursing expedition across country to Maynooth. They were entertained on their return by John Sheehan's father at Celbridge, and at supper Mahony offended the parish priest, Daniel Callinan, by disrespectful remarks about Daniel O'Connell, for whom he always showed a total want of sympathy. He returned with his companions to Clongoweswood very late at night and half intoxicated, and his resignation consequently followed. After a short sojourn at the jesuits' college at Freiburg he went again to Italy. At Florence he was informed by the provincial of the jesuits that his association with the order was at an end. Mahony felt the indignity keenly, but showed no animosity against his former colleagues, whom he subsequently defended from conventional accusations in an essay called ‘Literature and the Jesuits’ (cf., Reliques). No longer a jesuit, he sought to become a priest. For two years he attended theological lectures at Rome, and in 1832 obtained, with some difficulty, priest's orders. In 1832 he was directed to join the Cork mission, and displayed courage and devotion as chaplain to a hospital in Cork during the cholera epidemic of that and the following year (Hibernia, 1 Feb. 1882; cf. KENT'S Introduction). Anxious to obtain the erection of a new church, to be administered by himself, he came into collision with his bishop over some point of detail, and hastily severed his connection with his native city. He thereupon made London his headquarters, and soon abandoned the active exercise of his profession. On a few occasions he preached and conducted mass in the Spanish ambassador's chapel. But his tone of thought and conversation was unclerical. His interests were mainly literary, and, befriended by his fellow-townsman, [q. v.], he readily adopted the bohemian mode of life that then characterised London literary society.

In April 1834 Mahony sent to ‘Fraser's Magazine’ an article entitled ‘Father Prout's Apology for Lent, his Death Obsequies, and an Elegy.’ A real Father Prout, parish priest at Watergrasshill, co. Cork, ‘a man of quiet, simple manners,’ was well known to Mahony in his boyhood, and died in 1830. But Mahony's ‘Father Prout,’ although located at Watergrasshill like the real personage of the name, is, for all practical purposes, a