Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/53

 The Register was conducted at this time by Hugh Lynar, a Northern Unitarian, who afterwards obtained public employment at the Cape of Good Hope. He was a man of integrity and capacity, who probably found the task of conducting a journal essentially Catholic rendered tolerable by the opportunity it afforded of supporting the policy of the Mulgrave Administration. Lord Mulgrave, Lord Morpeth, and Thomas Drummond were at the Castle, and were ruling the country in a way which an enlightened Whig like Lynar could unreservedly applaud.

I entered on this new employment with a feverish desire to justify my promotion, which nearly proved fatal to a constitution never robust. Rooms in the Register office were assigned me, and for a month together I sometimes did not cross the threshold, except on a Sunday morning, and Lynar and other friends warned me that I would destroy myself if I did not relax this perpetual strain. But country walks with a chum brought me back into contact with nature, and none of the luxuries of a varied life rivalled the pleasure which we found in a luncheon of bread and cheese and porter after a long confabulation. The recreation which I loved best, and which all my life long continued to be a keen enjoyment, was a frank confabulation with a friend upon men and books and the eternal problems of life. Since my arrival in Dublin I made a friend, Clarence Mangan, with whom a Saturday night, the newspaper holiday, spent together till the small hours sounded, was a constant delight. His memory for poetry was prodigious, and he recited speeches from Byron's dramas or Shakespeare's, or long passages from Anster's "Faust" or Marlowe's, with an intensity and sympathy which resembled dramatic skill, but was something rarer and more touching. He told me from time to time the story of his doleful life, and finally introduced me to the heroine who had unconsciously turned that drama into a tragedy. Before I left Monaghan I was familiar with his contributions to the Comet, the Penny Journal, and the Dublin University Magazine; but I got less pleasure I believe from his racy translations than from the mad antics, banter, and burlesque into which he sometimes broke. After five-and-fifty years I can still recall, not without a titillation of the midriff, his