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    520 The Leader and Saturday Analyst. [Ju...

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    WHO SHOT THE DOG P SOME ten or a dozen y...

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    Irish Character And English Counsel. Of ...

    St . Fb . eke , who stickles his sister ' s child at the tip of his ear ; a St . Mochita , who transfers the deadly ulcer of one of his votaries to ^ the church bell , and the excessive pallor of another to his walking-stick ; a St . Fijian , who makes stolen lamb bleat in the stomachs of the thieves . St . Patrick and St . Bebach have both the gift of making roaring fires out of ice and snow j the obedient gate of St . Colttmbanus opens when he tells it . Some inconsequent Irish monks build a water-mill at the top of a mountain ( probably the near relatives of the Irish soldiers who set the points of their stockades

    towards themselves instead of towards the enemy ); no matter , St . Fechin corrects the bull by commissioning the waters to the top of the hill . We will only add one more—St . Maetanxts , who writes by the light of his own radiant fingers , the only miracle to which we can find a parallel in some of the journalists of the present day , whose illumination does not seem to come from any more distant source : and this was the trash self-imposed on the fellowcountrymen of EEiGENA , to whose land Bede says that many of the Rno- ' wli o-1 fi « 11 v wfliit for the sake of a morality and erudition which

    they could not find at home . It is true England had no small share in the firm establishment of PoperySin the sister island , but she is scarcely responsible for the excessive congeniality ot the plant and the soil , any more than for the disorders which the Strongbows found on their arrival ^ and which their descendants certainly did not cure , through a long era of mismanagement and oppression , whereof the details are most disgracefully and dishonestly slurred over in most of our English histories . Want of sincerity and good faith is acharge widely brought against the Irish , even by their best friends . Swift says he scarcely ever went into a draper's and got the article which he asked and paid for . Sir William Temple tells us that they ruined their own characters as provision merchants by putting bad beef into the middle of their casks ; and the trick of the false brands upon goods which the English have taken so kindly is menin Ireland think in

    tioned as having been practised long ago —we Lord Stkaffoed ' s letters . The dirty tricks we have thus borrowed were scarcely either in the first instance our own gift or the base fruits of a servile condition . The original laws of Ireland show the national taint prior to English conquest . The three capital crimes of ancient Irish law were " 1 . Breaking theearnest of sureties ; 2 . Breaking an oath beforewitnesses ; 3 . Giving false evidence . For these flaws , then , England is not to be blamed any more than for that regardlessness about taking life which made the fratricide king Do 2 v 6 gk lay the crown , _ theJiarp , and the tegalia of Bbian Boeit at the feet of the Pope as the pledges of the full submission of the kingdom ;—a murder which has in the long run proved "the fertile mother of ten thousand more , " with the-connivance , jf not at the dictation , of the priests of that very Church to which this atonement

    was offered . . Ag-ainst these traits , which we mention with regret , we may set a spontaneous generosity , and a hospitality which was once a national institution ^ aud has never ceased to be a national habit . The Arab is hospitable at the dictate of his religion ; with ^ the ancient Irish a boundless and organised hospitality was enjoined by a civil law , which , no doubt , reflected the genius and disposition of the people . One characteristic of Ireland is most remarkable——rhe ^ eiy-greatHlmproyeTttent-which-transDlantation-inakes-in-all-hei?—human products : the general impression that this is so may , indeed , be partly owing to the cold shade thrown over Ireland by the long and haughty predominance of England , —a shade which

    ripening ; or if perchance they have attained to ripeness , leaving them hidden in the gloom ; but whatever the cause , the fact is certain . Even the great men of the old and glorious days of Ireland , whatever merit they may have had in their own , earned their greatest honours in foreign lands . Flood , Gbattan , and Cubban threw their lustre on the last days of an Irish Parliament ; but Bubke gained her her highest honours in a wider field , ^ which gave more scope to the growth of his laurels . If a prophet has small credit in his own country , his honour is likely to be still less when his country is enslaved and in discredit . "Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired ; Bid it come forth . " .

    So forth Jicts come the willing exile of Erin , though we must confess not invariably adorned with the modest blush of Walleb's rose . Great has been the exodus froiri Ireland of tnlent , when united with even a moderate ambition . ' For though genius is said to be like the pnlm-tree , which rises under and against the incumbent weight , Irish genius , at any rate , has rarely had the triumph of overcoming depression , preferring greatly to escape it . However , setting aside the intellectual growth of Ireland , no one will deny the advantage of transplantation to at any rat © two classes—the workman and the soldier . In these , the change of air , soil , ideas , and example , work the greatest wonders . ! Of the former class , as we see them in England , no one could , with any justice , repeat the words of the worthy

    Bishop of Cloynb , fa hte address tothe BoWjon Catholic qlergy;—"I have known , them decline even the lightest labour , that of haymaking , having , at the same time , neither clothes for their backs npr food for their bellies . " The Irish labourer will actually come to England for work which he would neither seek nor do at home . On this point there is no occasion to dwell further . The effect is probably the same when he emigrates to that western hemisphere , the original home of his beloved and congenial potato . In passing from the labourer to the soldier , wo may panso for a moment at a email claps between the two , and question whether the two heroes of the ring-, whose names have probably been in every single mouth in the United Kingdom and the United States , would have mated

    each other with an energy equally indefatigable at Donnybrook fair , or any other favourite native arena of Hibernian strife . With the Irish soldiery it has been the same—omitting the legend . of the battle of Clontarf against the Danes , when every wounded hero * tied to his stake , emulated the Roman ' s prayer to his companion :--"Me quoque mittendis rectum componite telis . " Omitting , too , the obscure strife of kingdom with kingdom and clan with clan , the Irish have not generally ishone in the battles on their own soil . Under Cabby , in the time of Elizabeth ; under Cbomwell ; under William of Obange , if we except the battle of Anghrim , the story has been the same , of the English driving them from post to post in defeat and confusion , with very few-instances of a resolute and continuous resistance . Take the first half of the fifth book of Bttbnet ' s " History of his own Times , " and you can

    scarcely conceive that you are reading of the same race who have so often shed their blood freely and at fearful odds , when that blood was to moisten not their own but a foreign soil . We speaker officers and men alike ; indeed , their officers alone would furnish a band of immortals . To this strange race mixture with bands of alien blood has ever proved more inspiring than a national cause . Nor have the English alone discovered this , or alone been benefited by it . Richelieu calculated on the action and reaction of courage and example , and made a point of mixing French and Irish brigades . To nearly every victory of that period the Irish materially contributed , almost always carrying off the colours of the enemy , and very rarely , indeed in scarcely a single instance , losing their own . and

    The distinction earned by his countrymen in foreign , especially French service , celebrated in a letter of the famous Sir Chables WoaxN , is accompanied by the bitter complaints of the trifling amount of gratitude which they ^ succeeded in exciting ia the minds of their employers and coreligionists . We may repeat some of his complaints for the benefit and warning of those who have stepped forward to serve in the Popish hands under 'L amobiciebe . That , as far as fighting goes , they will give another exemplification of Irish , heightened by mixture with alien , valour there can be little doubt . Considering their cause , we can scarcely wish theth more ample remuneration than most of their countrymen , met with in all but English service ^ , ^ , . ^ . "The only fruit the Irish have reaped by their valour is their extinction , and that general fame which they have lost themselves to acquire for tlieiivcounlry , already lost with respect to them . ' but still sufficientlclear

    Rather an Irish sentence , y . Again . " They are extinct to a very considerable number , and have not left one single settlement in all the ' . continent to their posterity . . The very scum of French refugees have had much better treatment and fortune in those countries where they were only a charge to . the Government than the Irish nobility arid gentry have met with , where their courage and fidelity were in a great measure it * " France / upon their arrival , gave them a cruel reduction of their officers and their pay for a welcome , by a scandalous breach of faith , sacrificed them to her wars , made their zeal and spirit the dupes of her idle pretences , and at last disbanded inhumanly great numbers of them to the wide world after the peace of Ryswick . " ~ One mbl-enextrffCtriss * " ^ ~~ . , ~ ~~~~ "Yet their principal officers , who have signalised themselves UUwlBlUlie wjj jy ^

    equally Weil upUUmt , uavc auTauvvu »« «« « »» v « «» w . ment than that of lieutenant-general , whereas Scots , Germans , Livouians , Italians , have been promoted to the dignity of marshals We are * aware that both France and Spain have wiped off the stain of ingratitude , by admitting , after long naturalisation , the scions of Irish families to the posts earned by their merit ; but in the Pope ' s future , perhaps the Irish bands can hardly anticipate even such tardy recognition of their services as those who have inherited the name and the bravery of the O'Neils , the O'Donnels , and the MacMahons . Whatever may have been England's oppression of their race , in her ranks they would scarcely be likely to wait so long . If they now go out in a crusading spirit aud in expectation of an eternal reward , well ; if they are in hopes of any adequate temporal recompense , it is their expectation that is likely to be eternal .

    520 The Leader And Saturday Analyst. [Ju...

    520 The Leader and Saturday Analyst . [ June 2 , 186 a

    Who Shot The Dog P Some Ten Or A Dozen Y...

    WHO SHOT THE DOG P SOME ten or a dozen years ago , the appearance in the streets of a gentleman in a white hat wns wont to provoke the street boys to indulge in inquiries respecting the purloining of a certain donkey . It appeared that an animal of that breed had been stoleny and the question of the day was , who had done the deed P About the same period an inquiry respecting the surreptitious partaking of a puppy pie under Mariow Bridge was much demanded of the Thames watermen . When the wearers of white hats and the bargees had outlived these base insinuations , the public at large fell tinder the auapicion ^ of being able to tell-what had become of Eliza , and the whereabouts of that lady was the subject of anxious and unceasing inquiry for a whole summer . Whether there was any good ground for suspecting * that any donkey had ever been abstracted from jts rightful owner by a person in a . white hat , or whether the stealing of a donkey was simply a gratuitous assumption , —what pretence there was for associating bargemen with puppy pies ; and who wns Eliza , are questions which , we believe , have never been satisfactorily determined . Their origin , like the authorship of " Juimis , " and other moot points , must remain to perplex posterity and engage the minds of the p hilologists of a future ago . Let us hasten to rescue the popular interrogatory of the present

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 2, 1860, page 12, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_02061860/page/12/