Page:Life of Edmond Malone.djvu/59

Rh of the day, adding:—“However insecure Junius may be from criticism, Johnson is still more so.”

Ill health overtook him while at his father’s country residence, Shinglas, Westmeath, in 1772, and occasioned some months’ confinement. The devoted attention shown by his sister Catherine on this occasion was never forgotten. It would appear also that this incident added strength to the regrets that ill-fortune still condemned him to the hapless condition of a bachelor.

In Dublin, the absence of briefs produced divided allegiance between the newspapers and the Forum. He who could not officially talk law, might talk or write politics; and those paper squibs and crackers to which allusion has been made, found vent in abundance. To these, Malone makes allusion in some of his letters, but without such distinctness as serve to mark his own, excepting one. It is ironical; and produced probably from some new ideas started on political economy. He laments in a well-handled paper the notorious improvidence of so poor a people as the Irish, who devour eggs by millions, which if permitted to become fowls would be of more than twenty times the value! For papers of more serious import, he calls upon the great orator and patriot of the day, Henry Flood, to testify to his industry when addressing a Dublin constituency on his own account, soon afterwards. He was of course patriotic in opinions. Who at such an age is not? And what theme more prolific to Irishmen than Ireland?

Toward the beginning of 1773, his brother, then in London, communicated details of a war among the