The Sun.
London, England, 1867-07-25 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Reliques of Father Prout. New Edition.
Complete in One Volume. Bell and Daldy.
Call him how you please—Father Prout, Oliver
Yorke, Francis Mahony—the brilliant wit and ripe
scholar who penned these radiant and racy
" Reliques" had carved out for himself before his
death an unique and enduring niche in the
Walhalla of our national literature. And from that
niche none will ever care to topple his effigy or oust
his reputation. He has won it. It is there. It
is fairly and securely established. And what is re-
markable about these writings in their very origin, is
this—that they grew up gradually, imperceptibly,
in a manner quite unpremeditatedly, under the
hand of their writer, as a series of occasional
contributions to Fraser's 211agazine : contributions
for the most part of a very fragmentary, some few
among them even of an apparently quite fugitive
character. Pleasantries light as air—the merest bub-
bles, so to speak, born of the effervescence of a
sparkling and irrepressible wit—these quite casual
trifles (no better seemingly than so many chance
straws, flies, and so forth) have somehow or another,
after floating loosely down the current of Father
Prout's fancy, become congealed, embedded, em-
balmed, eternised in the amber of his scholarship.
And here, in this same comprehensive and delightful
gathering together of them all, we have the fun and
frolic, the learned acumen, the incisive irony, the rol-
licking humour, the poignant sarcasm, the exquisite
taste, the eloquence, the erudition, and the scholarly
larking (for after all there is really no other phrase
for it than scholarly larking) of this grog-
swigging, joke-cracking, song-singing, bright-eyed,
mellow-voiced, open-handed, large-hearted, Parish
Priest of Watergrasshill, in the county of Cork,
Ireland—the brogue from whose tongue was only
the more delectably laughter-moving from its having
been flavoured, as it were, by the sufficiently ob-
vious fact of that same tongue having once upon a
time given a lick to the blarney-stone. As to this the
latest " new edition" of Father Prout's " Reliques,"
the volume is, in simple truth, a ne plus ultra. It
has been carefully revised throughout, and—what
is far more—it has been largely augmented. In
the mere embellishment of it, the book is precious,
and one that every possessor will (once having it)
gladly treasure up on his book-shelves. They are
the earliest manifestations (these embellishments)
of the genius of one of the greatest painters
now living, Daniel Maclise, or—(as he might have
been, only that he is understood to have declined
both those proffered honours from the Crown and from
his profession)—Sir Daniel Maclise, President of the
Royal Academy. Scattered through the delicious
letter-press of this volume are one- and-twenty of the
earliest productions of Maclise's pencil—etchings,
many of them, quite perfect in their way as illustra-
tions of character. First and foremost, there is
that wonderful, historical, folding frontispiece,
giving us seven-and-twenty life-like portraitures of
writers in Fraser two-and-thirty years ago—namely,
arm° domini 1835. And of which seven-and-twenty
celebrities (seven-and-twenty—that is, including
among them Fraser himself) not more, alas !
than six are actually still surviving : those
six Jerdan (once upon a time
one among our own predecessors as Editor of The
Sun newspaper)—Barry Cornwall (otherwise Bryan
Waller Procter, ex-Lunacy Commisioner)— Thomas
Carlyle (then issuing from the press, piecemeal,
" Sartor Resartus")—Harrison Ainsworth (still, to
this day, indefatigably wielding his pen as a popular
romancist) —Rev. George Hobert Gleig (still, as he has
been eversince 1816, the honoured Chaplain-General
of the Forces), and last, not least, of the illustrious
group, Sir David Brewster, the venerable natural
philosopher, to whose ingenuity the world is indebted
for (among other beautiful contrivances) both the
Kaleidoscope and the Stereoscope. All the rest of
that one-and-twenty who two-and-thirty years
ago were feasting with those still surviving
six in 1835, at 212, Regent-street, when Fraser
and his six-and-twenty most famous contri-
butors were pencilled by the hand of young
Daniel Maclise, have, one after another, dropped
gut of life, lapsing thereupon into so many mere
memories! Among them—Coleridge, Thackeray,
D'Orsay, Lockhart, Hook, Muir, Hogg., Galt,
Siuthey, Crofton Croker, and Allan Cunningham !
Side by side, too, on the left hand of Maginn—the
Reverend Francis Mahony and the Reverend
Edward Irving—the Catholic Priest and the foun-
der of the Irvingites ! Sir Egerton Beydges, Dun-
lop, Percival Bankes, Churchill, Macnish, and Ser-
geant Murphy—completing the catalogue of those
assembled I Opposite the cartoon-frontispiece there
is, too, that delightful vignette on the title-
page representing "The first Planting of the
Potato° in Ireland"—Sir Walter Raleigh stand-
ing by as witness of the incident, with a short pipe
of tobacco—a genuine dudheen—between his lips.
A du sheen—or a clay pipe of any kind for that
matter--being simply, of course, an anachronism—
remembering how tobacco-smoking was first of all
enjoyed by Sir Walter and other early English
smokers through the aid of a straw an I a walnut-
shell, or other such exceedingly primitive devices.
As for the occasional likenesses scattered through
the book, some among them are absolutely wonder-
ful, from their life-like verisimilitude. Instance
this—Sir Walter Scott (p. 51) Kissing the
Blarney Stone—L. E. L. (p. 229) seated on
a moonlit bank with the young artist, Maclise
himself, reclining at her feet as her lover
—or Bdranger, again, (p. 313) seated tranquilly
with his feet crossed, in quiet meditation. Turning,
however, from the scattered pictures by Maclise to
the affluent letterpress by Prout —what charming
morceaux we 'light upon as we casually turn the
pages ! Foremost among them Mahony's own
choicest metrical masterpiece, those melodious " Bells
of Shandon," the music of which rings charmingly
to us from the distance of the past, and will con-
tinue so to ring on, charmingly, down the lengthen-
ing perspective of the future. Then, too, those
inimitable " Rogueries of Tom Moore"—as, for
example—

Lesbia hats a beaming eye,
But no ono knows for whom it beameth ;
Right and left its arrows fly,
But what they aim at no one dreameth, &o.
Translated thus by Prout—
Lesbia sniper hive et inde
Oculorum tela movit ;
Captat omnes, sod delude
Quis amotur nemo novit, Sce.
Or, again :
_

"Go where glory waits thee, do."

Translated thus:—

" Va Cu la gloire t'invite ;
Et quand d'orgueil palpite
Ce comr, qu'il pease moi, etc."

Or, yet again :

" Wreathe the bowl
With flowers of soul, Om"

Translated thus :--

Erok(opep OVv KureXXov
Totr avecµmcrt +yrs.
There is one peculiarity about these really astonish-
ing feats of scholarship, wit, and poetry combined,
that has always seemed to us very noticeable in-
deed in Father Prout's [or as he ought rather to
have been known, as in propria persona in Father
Mahony's] instance as a Master-Philologist, that he
was, as a rule, at his best, far rather when translating
from English into another language—Greek, Latin,
French, Italian, what you will—than when trans-
lating into English from those languages, as in the in-
stance, let us say, of odes or lyrics penned by Horace,
Piudar, B6ranger, Petrarch, &c. Better, for example,
far and away bettor, that bewildering transference
from Moore to Petrarch of--
"Fly not yet ! the fount that played," &c.
"Transformed into—
" Sorgo nel mezzo giorno," see.
Better that,we say,than any,:even the choicest among
his versions in our vernacular of many priceless gems
from the peerless Roman Lyrist, or from (in his
school) the noless peerless French Chansonnier ! Still,
what metrical translations there are, too, among
Prout's Songs of Italy, Songs of France, and Songs of
Horace!—with individual lines here and there quite
worthy the bards they affect to come from—
" • • . Jewels five welds long,
That on the stretched fore-finger of all Time,
Sparkle for over."
Then, too, what outpourings there are here
of flu/ and frolic in their very revelry and
devilry, one is almost tempted to say ! Where
possibly could we hope to find them more eigually