Ridiculum acri Fortius ac melius.

At the same time, he had his se. rious hours and graver topics, which he would handle with all due solemnity of thought and language, and these were to me some of the most pleasing hours I have passed with him, for he could keep close to his point, if he would, and could be not less argumentative than he was eloquent, when the question was of magnitude enough to interest him. It is with singular satisfaction I can truly say, that I never knew him flippant upon sacred subjects. He was, however, generally courted and admired as a gay companion rather than as a grave one.

I have said that the dowager ladies Stafford and Hervey made part of our domestic society; and as the trivial amusement of cards was never resorted to in Mr. Dodington's house, it was his custom in the evenings to entertain his company with reading, and in this art he excelled. His selections, however, were curious, for he treated these ladies with the whole of Fielding's Jonathan Wild, in which he certainly consulted his own turn for irony rather than their's for elegance; but he set it off with much humour after his manner, and they were polite enough to be pleased, or at least to appear as if they were.

His readings from Shakespeare were altogether as whimsical, for he chose his passages only where buffoonery was the character of the scene; one of these, I remember, was that of the clown, who brings the asp to Cleopatra. He had, how ever, a manuscript copy of Glover's Medea, which he gave us con amore, for he was extremely warm in his praises of that classical drama, which Mrs. Yates afterwards brought upon the stage, and played in it with her accustomed excellence. He did me also the honour to devote an evening to the reading of some lines, which I had hastily written, to the amount of about four hundred, partly complimentary to him as my host,

and in part consolatory to lord Halifax, upon the event of his retiring from public office. They flattered the politics then in favour with Mr. Dodington, and coincided with his wishes for detaching lord Halifax from the administration of the duke of Newcastle. I was not present, as may well be conceived, at this reading; but I confess I sate listening. in the next room, and was not a little gratified by what I overheard.

Of this manuscript I have long since destroyed the only copy that I had; and if I had it now in my hands, it would be only to consign it to the flames; for it was of that occasional class of poems for the day, which have no claim upon posterity, and in such I have not been ambitious to concern myself: it served the purpose, however, and amused the moment: it was also the tribute of my mite to the lares of that mansion, where the muse of Young had dictated his tragedy of The Revenge, and which the genius of Voltaire had honoured with a visit: here Glover had courted in. spiration, and Thomson caught it: Dodington also himself had a lyre, but he had hung it up, and it was never very high-sounding. Yet he was something more than a mere admirer of the muse. He wrote small poems with great pains, and elaborate letters with much terse ness of style, and some quaintness of expression. I have seen him refer to a volume of his own verses in manuscript, but he was very shy, and I never had the perusal of it. I was rather better acquainted with his diary, which, since his death, has been published; and I well remember the temporary disgust he seemed to take, when, upon his asking what I would do with it, should he bequeath it to my discretion, I instantly replied, that I would destroy it. There was a third, which I more coveted a sight of than either of the above, as it contained a miscellaneous collection of anecdotes, repartees, good sayings, and humorous incidents, of which he was part author and part compiler, and out of

which he was in the habit of refreshing his memory, when he prepared himself to expect certain men of wit and pleasantry, either at his own house or elsewhere. Upon this practice, which he did not affect to conceal, he observed to me one day, that it was a compliment he paid to society, when he submitted to steal weapons out of his own armoury for their entertainment; and ingenuously added, that although his memory was not in general so correct as it had been, yet he trusted it would save him from the disgrace of repeating the same story to the same hearers, or foisting it into conversation in the wrong place, or out of time. No man had fewer oversights of that sort to answer for, and fewer still were the men whose social talents could be compared with those of Mr. Dodington.

Sketches of the Irish Character.

Every body, who has travelled in Ireland, and witnessed the wretched accommodation of the inns, particularly in the west, knows that it requires some forecast and preparation to conduct a large family on their journey. It certainly is as different from travelling in England as possible, and not much unlike travelling in Spain; but with my father for our provider, whose appointments of servants and equipage were ever excellent, we could feel few wants, and arrived in good time at our journey's end, where, upon the banks of the great river Shannon, in a nook of land, on all sides, save one, surrounded by an impassable bog, we found the episcopal residence, by courtesy called palace, and the church of Clonfert, by custom called cathedral.

This humble residence was not devoid of comfort and convenience, for it contained some tolerable lodging rooms, and was capacious enough to receive me and mine without straitening the family. A garden of seven acres, well planted and disposed into pleasant walks, kept in

the neatest order, was attached to the house, and at the extremity of a broad gravel walk in front stood the cathedral.

Within this boundary the scene was cheerful; all without it was either impenetrable bog, or a dreary, undressed country: but whilst all was harmony, hospitality, and affection underneath the parental roof, "the mind was its own place," and every hour was happy.

My father lived, as he had ever done, beloved by all around him: the same benevolent and generous spirit, which had endeared him to his neighbours and parishioners in England, now began to make the like impressions on the hearts of a people, as far different in character as they were distant in place from those, whom he had till now been concerned with. Without descending from the dignity he had to support, and condescending to any of the paltry modes of courting popularity, I instantly perceived how high he stood in their esteem; these observations I was perfectly in the way to make, for I had no forms to keep, and was withal uncommonly delighted with their wild, eccentric humours, mixing with all ranks and descriptions of men, to my infinite amusement.

If I have been successful in my dramatic sketches of the Irish character, it was here I studied it in its purest and most primitive state; from high to low it was now under my view. Though I strove to present it in its fairest and best light upon the stage, truth obliges me to confess there was another side of the picture, which could not have been contemplated without affright and horror. Atrocities and violences, which set all law and justice at defiance, were occasionally committed in this savage and licentious quarter, and suffered to pass over with impunity.

In the neighbouring town of Eyre Court, they had, by long usage, assumed to themselves certain local and self-constituted privileges and exemptions, which rendered it un

approachable by any officers or emissaries of the civil power, who were universally denounced as mad dogs, and subjected to be treated as such, and even put to death with as little ceremony or remorse. I speak of what actually occurred within my own immediate knowledge, whilst I resided with my father, in more instances than one, and those instances would be shocking to relate. To stem these daring outrages, and to stand in opposition to these barbarous customs, was an undertaking that demanded both philanthropy and courage, and my father of course was the very man to attempt it. Justice and generosity were the instruments he employed; and I saw the work of reformation so auspiciously begun, and so steadily pursued by him, as convinced me that minds the most degenerate may be, to a degree, reclaimed by actions that come home to their feelings, and are evidently directed to the sole purposes of amending their manners and improving their condition.

To suppose they were a race of beings stupidly vicious, devoid of sensibility, and delivered over by their natural inertness to barbarism and ignorance, would be the very falsest character that could be conceived of them; it is, on the contrary, to the quickness of their apprehensive faculties, to the precipitancy and unrestrained vivacity of their talents and passions, that we must look for the causes, and in some degree for the excuse, of their excesses together with their ferocious propensities there are blended and compounded humours so truly comic, eccentricities so peculiar, and attachments and affections at times so inconceivably ardent, that it is not possible to contemplate them in their natural characters, without being diverted by extravagances, which we cannot seriously approve, and captivated by professions, which we cannot implicitly give credit to.

The bishop held a considerable parcel of land, arable and grazing, in his hands, or, more properly speaking, in the phrase of the coun

try, a large demesne, with a numer. ous tribe of labourers, gardeners, turf-cutters, herdsmen, and handicraftmen of various denominations. His first object, and that not an easy one to obtain, was to induce them to pursue the same methods of husbandry as were practised in England, and to observe the same neat and cleanly course of cultivation. This was a great point gained: they began it with unwillingness, and watched it with suspicion; their idle neighbours, who were without employ, ridiculed the work, and predicted that their hay stacks would take fire, and their corn be rendered unfit for use: but in the further course of time, when they experi enced the advantages of this process, and witnessed the striking contrast of these productive lands, compared with the slovenly grounds around them, they began to acknowledge their own errors, and to reform them.

With these operations the improvements of their own habitations were contrived to keep pace; their cabins soon wore a more comfortable and decent appearance; they furnished them with chimnies, and emerged out of the smoke in which they had buried and suffocated their families and themselves. When these old habits were corrected within doors, on the outside of every one of them there was to be seen a stack of hay, made in the English fashion, thatched and secured from the weather, and a lot of potatoes, carefully planted and kept clean, which, with a suitable proportion of turf, secured the year's provision both for man and beast.

When these comforts were placed in their view, they were easily led to turn their attention to the better appearance of their persons; and this reform was not a little furthered by the premium of a Sunday's dinner to all who should present themselves in clean linen, and with wellcombed hair, without the customary addition of a scarecrow wig; so that the swarthy Milesian no longer ap. peared with a yellow wig upon his