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Ah me! turned away your face for ever from me. The morning mists faded away; the mid-day sun streamed over hills and towers and valley. The bell of the Trinità hard by began to toll.

know what it would be to have it otherwise | bearance and generosity. When I think of than as it is" (this clasping your hands). myself, I am ashamed and humiliated; when "But you don't ask it. Ah! forgive me, I think of him" Here you suddenly and say you don't ask it." Then standing broke off, and turned away your face. straight and looking down with a certain sweet dignity, you went on- "Heaven has sent me a great and unexpected happiness, but there is, indeed a bitter, bitter cup to drink as well. Though I throw you over, though I behave so selfishly, don't think that I am utterly conscienceless, that I do hot suffer a cruel pang indeed; when I think how you must look at me, when I remember what return I am making for all your for

I said, "Good by, and heaven keep you, my dear. I would not have had you do otherwise." And so I went back to my lodging.

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From The Pall Mall Gazette.
FATHER PROUT.*

MANY of our readers must have remarked, passing in and out the reading-room of Galignani's Library of late years, a figure singular enough to attract a glance of curiosity even in Paris. The figure we mean was that of a little elderly man with an intellectual head, and whose keen bluish eyes had a queer way of looking up sharply over the rims of his spectacles. His garb was ecclesiastical in its general character, but, above all, was the garb of one very lit tle careful of appearances; for if his shirt happened to be white it seldom boasted buttons, and there were many days when both whiteness and buttons were wanting to it. The manner of this little figure, too, was as quaint and interesting as his appearance. If you knew him, he saluted you with some quaint caustic bit of badinage, all the richer for a touch of brogue which had long ceased to be provincial and gave only a fine tinge of nationality that suited the speaker's humour. He would make some half-droll inquiry, tell some droll anecdote, not improbably garnished with a bit of classic parsley in the form of a quotation from Horace, and then, as likely as not, would dart off, sticking his hands in his coat pockets, without saluting either yourself or the companion whom you had introduced to him. In the afternoon our little man of the good head and the keen eyes was at his desk on a ground-floor in the Rue des Moulins (not

far from where the Jacobin Club used to

lic ecclesiastic well known in the convivial
clubs of London. The Sacred College knew
all about him, and he bandied innumerable
repartees with Douglas Jerrold. Such a
not a celebrated man, without some estimate
man ought not to pass away, even were he
being attempted of what he did in the world.

Father Prout's life make it difficult to fix all
The very variety and many-sidedness of
its details, much less to fix them in their
to a respectable and substantial family in
proper chronological order. He belonged
Cork, many of whom lie under the spire of
Shandon, whose bells he has celebrated in
the happiest of his lyrics, and was born early
in the century. He was educated for the
Priesthood by the Jesuits, chiefly in France.
He was at their seminaries of St. Acheul
the Rue de Sèvres. That his talents were
and Mont Rouge, and under the priests in
early remarked we know from a book pub-
lished by a great enemy of the Order in
1826. In this work, "Les Jésuites Moder-
nes," where sketches are given of many
notable Jesuits old and young of that day,
a paragraph is devoted to " O'Mahoni, né en
used to amuse poor Prout to the last, by its
Irlande." It contains one passage which
absurdity as a prediction of his career.
dra plus insensible, et plus cruel encore, que
jeune O'Mahoni," says the writer, "devien-
les inquisiteurs les plus endurcis de Sarra-
gosse et de Valence."

many

an

of those eggs.

66

us,

Le

The notion of an ining an oyster in the Strand, tickled his fancy quisitor smoking in the cigar divan, or takhugely, and he wrote himself down in an autograph before "Frank Mahony de meet) redacting the news and gossip of Saragosse." The Order of Jesus has hatched Paris that day into a letter, easy, pithy, sen- chick from which was by no means a bird egg Voltaire for one-the sible, with a dash of mockery and scholarship about it just enough to make it dis- to its taste. Frank Mahony proved another tinctive and unique. The letter over, he his literary obligations to them, and repaid But he always acknowledged strolled out, holding a favourite white dog them in the excellent essay on "Literature in a string, to dine in the Palais Royal and and the Jesuits," reprinted from Fraser's smoke a cigar in a café afterwards, and so wind up the day. There was in all he said Magazine in his "Reliques of Father Prout." and wrote and did meanwhile a certain im- iarity with Latin?" a friend asked him. Where did you get your wonderful familpress of character, a certain cachet d'original-From the Jesuits," he said, "where we ité, which set him apart from the common live in an element of it." But though run even of clever men. And indeed Francis Mahony, commonly called Father Prout, and at Rome, and became priest, and served Mahony went through his course in France was no common man either in genius or ex-in different places, Switzerland and (we pression. Many elements met in him, as in believe) Ireland included, - Nature had ina mayonnaise, to make a piquant mixture. tended him He was a Jesuit and a humorist; a priest Erasmus-for a man of letters. The irre-as she intended the priest and a Bohemian; a scholar and a journalist; sistible gravitation with which the press a wag and a song writer; a Cork man familiar to everybody in Rome; a Roman Catho- the men, however diverse, whom it requires, draws to it, in its head-quarters of London, from all scenes and regions of life is a striking phenomenon both morally and pictu

Francis Mahony, known as Father Prout, died

on the 19th May, in a Monastery in Paris.

resquely. He may be a Scotch schoolmaster, or a midshipman on the South American station, or a student of the Propaganda, or an officer in a West India regiment, or a Manchester bagman · the great power will have him, if he be due to her, some day. So Frank Mahony obeyed the law, and while still a young man in 1834 was enrolled among the Fraserians. They formed a brilliant group, and are sketched to the life, by the pencil of Maclise, in the second edition of the "Prout Reliques" (1860). A vigorous Cork man, Dr. Maginn, full of wit and literature and pugnacity, presides. The grey hairs of Coleridge are seen near the classic face of Lockhart. Frank Mahony is one of the juniors there, as Thackeray himself was, and the quick expression of Mahony's Irish lineaments and eye still lived in them in his old age. The scene has its permanent interest in our literature, for recollections of such scenes and of that period were among the constituent elements of "Pendennis."

Mahony brought to that company talents and attainments not indeed equal to those of the highest men there, but far above those of some of them, and such as at any time must have made him distinguished. He had vivacious fanciful wit of the best Hibernian kind, somewhat extravagant occasionally, so that an epigram here and there suggests to you a potato with a sprinkle of Attic salt on it, but still brilliant and coloured with poetry, as wit like the Theodore Hook kind so rarely is. He had a pleasant lyrical vein akin to this; and a clever volatile shrewdness, very real in substance, however apparently light from its agility of movement. His continental experience had added modern languages to his classical learning, and given him a taste for multifarious translation, for pouring poetic thought backwards and forwards from old vessels into new- from ancient amphora into modern cask, from modern cask into ancient amphora. To give effect to these various gifts, he bethought himself— an excellent idea of embodying and personifying them in a dramatic or artistic figure. His choice of such a figure was naturally determined by his birth and education. He became "Father Prout," parish priest of Watergrasshill, not far from Cork; and the account he gives of this imaginary personage is highly characteristic of his opinions. "He was one of that race of priests now unfortunately extinct, or very nearly so, like the old breed of wolf-dogs in the island: I allude to those of his order who were edu

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cated abroad before the French Revolution, and had imbibed from associating with the polished and high-bred clergy of the old Gallican Church a loftier range of thought and a superior delicacy of sentiment." The pastor of Watergrasshill is a scholar of course; Mahony could not bear a half-lettered clergy like extremes meet· - those of Scotland or of Maynooth. Accordingly, he could fairly attribute to Father Prout all the essays, rich with various reading, in which he poured out the hoards of his own youth, and all the translations which made so pleasant a part of the same series. These Reliques of Father Prout" were commenced in Fraser's Magazine in the spring of 1834; collected into volumes in 1836; and reprinted with additions in 1860. They form light reading of the very best kind, and quite unlike much of the trash, equally destitute of real thought or of literature, which has been popular since. It is not only that the fun is mingled with learning, but the learning is mingled with fun; and the "Rogueries of Tom Moore," with all its license of comedy, is scarcely more amusing than the "Literature and the Jesuits," which is, nevertheless, an admirable summary of the claims of the Order on that ground. There is genuine humour in the Father's pretending that Moore had stolen his "Lesbia hath a beaming eye" from "an old Latin song of my own which I made when a boy, smitten with the charms of an Irish milkmaid who crossed by the hedgeschool occasionally, and who used to distract my attention from Corderius and· Erasmi Colloquia". an assertion which he backs up by such instances of plagarism as the following:

Lesbia vestes auro graves

Fert et gemmis juxta normam,
Gratiæ sed eheu! suaves
Cinctam reliquêre formam.

Lesbia hath a robe of gold,

But all so tight the nymph had laced it, Not a charm in beauty's mould

Presumes to stay where Nature placed it.

But even playfulnesses like this help to keep an interest in Latin alive; while in the graver pages of "Literature and the devoted to Loyola : Jesuits" there is serious power in the alcaics

Tellus gigantis sentit iter; simul Idola nutant, fana ruunt, micat Christi triumphantis trophæum, Cruxque novos numerat clientes.

Videre gentes Xaverii jubar
Igni corusco nubila dividens :
Coepitque mirans Christianos

Per medios fluitare Ganges.

Horace, of whom there is something more than an imitation here, though original power is present likewise, was at all times a prime favourite with Prout. He loved him as a Scotchman loves Burns, as a Parisian loves Béranger; and long after the Fraser days he delighted to quote from him, and to pun upon him. He could not, in a political article, speak of Talleyrand limping through the saloons of Napoleon, meditating his overthrow, without citing

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede Pœna claudo ;

and on such occasions, if you happened to
meet him in the street, he would say, "Did you
see the
this afternoon? Every man
with a tincture of Horace in him must roar
at that!"

The "Rogueries of Tom Moore" contains the delightful song the "Bells of Shandon," which has a real vein of tenderness in it, and which Mahony used to sing himself not without feeling. Those bells rang, too, at the christening of Captain Shandon, of "Pendennis," who evidently derived his name from them. Of the translations, which form so large a part of the "Reliques," one of the best is that of the "Grenier" of Béranger, whom Prout ranked among the moderns as high as he ranked Horace among the ancients.

by the authorities, he certainly ceased many years ago to do clerical duty. But he still treated his Church, and his own relation to it, as questions to be handled with serious respect never in the tone which detached clergymen, like Churchill, in our own Establishment have sometimes not hesitated to assume. When Thackeray once began to talk of St. Paul, Mahony expressed a hope that he did not mean to lecture on him as one of the humorists. And when a very different man took some liberties with his cloth, he put him down with a peremptory and fervid sarcasm, which he well knew how to use, and declined ever again to meet him or receive his apologies. He was a thorough humorist in character as in intellect, and even excessive in his departure from anything like conventional manners. But he was too good a gentleman, and too sound a thinker to tolerate any violation of what was essentially sacred in the decorum of life. Nay, those who saw him as lately as we did will remember a kind of tender reference to subjects previously kept in the background, which had not been observed before, and which seemed to indicate that the Shandon bells had left other than lyrical echoes in his soul. He remained, however, fundamentally scholar not priest; and much as he could admire the old Jesuits and the old Church, it was his fixed opinion that in intellect and learning, equally, both were now on the decline.

For some years Father Prout's head-quarters were in London, but he was frequently abroad. During a short time he held a post in Malta, and in the troublous period which followed the Revolution of 1848 he wrote admirable letters from Rome to the Daily News. The last period of his life was spent in Paris, his correspondence from which to the Globe was, as already hinted, always eminently readable and worth reading. He was a keen observer. He was no bigot in politics any more than in Church matters, and the common sense of every subject with a slight play of humour moving over it

On the whole, the "Reliques of Father Prout" are entitled to an honourable place in the Belles Lettres of our age, and will be always valued by those who think that light literature ought to be something better than a tissue of trivial buffoonery." He had strict notions," as he says himself, "as to what really constitute the Belles Lettres," and never recognized anybody as a man of letters who did not come up to a certain standard of attainment. The book gave was what he delighted to set forth. He him a distinct and high place in literature, became less cynical and caustic and not which ever afterwards was his principal vo- more so, with advancing age. Under all cation. What his exact relations to his his odd abruptness and quaint vein of satire, Church after this time were we cannot posi- a natural kindliness was visible. And probatively say. We have heard that some of his writings gave offence to O'Connell and the Roman Catholics who sympathized with him; and it is probable that his general freedom of tongue and pen were grave offences in the eyes of the orthodox. Whether he was suspended from his functions or not

bly no man with whom he was brought into contact, friendly or otherwise, but will hear with satisfaction that a sister of his blood and a priest of his faith cheered the deathbed of the lonely old wit and scholar, and helped to make his last hours pass tranquilly away.

From The Evangelist.

THE LATE PROFESSOR SILLIMAN.*

Even then, while but a young man, he
showed his firmness of principle and his
Christian consistency. When Professor
Barton proposed that his pupils should visit
Peale's Museum to examine the specimens

THERE are few names of which our countrymen may be more proud than that of the late Professor Silliman. He was emi-illustrative of his geological lectures on a nent in so many respects, admirable in so many relations, associated with so many and such distinguished men, while his career was at once so public, and so long, that few men of his time are so worthy of

an extended and honorable record.

His life by Professor Fisher, made up as it is, chiefly from his manuscript reminiscences, diaries, and correspondence, has

much of the charm of Franklin's autobiography, while the character it portrays is far more stainless. In these volumes it is exhibited in varied lights; but we always discern the same features, noble yet kindly, at once attracting our love and commanding our respect.

His personal appearance was such as to attract the notice of every observer. The venerable John Pierpont, who first saw him more than sixty years ago, says that he thought him then the handsomest man he had ever seen. All who have met him will recall his commanding form, his open intelligent countenance, his beaming eye, and his manners, gentlemanly and refined, from habitual courtesy as well as from native grace. His ready utterance, passing from familiarity, and even playfulness, to a high degree of eloquence, his enthusiasm in the cause of science, his obvious desire at once to instruct and please, all combined to place him in the very front rank of public lecturers, and rendered him a general favourite among all classes who enjoyed the privilege to hear him speak or con

verse.

he did not wish to interfere with their
Sunday, he modestly stated that although
that day which would make it necessary for
convenience, he had other occupations on
him to lose the contemplated benefit. The
the visit.
result was that another day was chosen for

Throughout a career extending beyond fourscore years, we observe this same fidelbition of his Christian convictions. When ity to principle, and the same fearless exhihis old associate, Dr. Hare, went over to spiritualism and avowed infidelity, giving Silliman wrote him a letter of kind but heed to mediums and seducing spirits, Prof. manly remonstrance, accompanying it with the present of "The Christ of History," a volume which he requested his friend carefully to read. His scientific correspondence with Dr. Mantell and others is interspersed quite unobtrusively with remarks which indicated his strong religious sympathies, and the cheering and sustaining

power of his faith.

dwell, now that he is gone. For more than It is upon these features that we love to confession as an humble disciple of Jesus sixty years this great man witnessed a good Christ. He was converted in the revival under President Dwight, and a singular charm invests his own record of the change in himself, as noted in his diary, or communicated to his mother. Always upright and conscientious, he now acted under the inspiration of a deep religious feeling. But As a pioneer in the cause of science in without its effect. His father was a deacon the training of his early years had not been this country, he is deserving of high praise. in the church at Stratford (now Trumbull), He may almost be said to have given shape to mineralogy, chemistry, and geology and considerable eminence in civil and a man of good education, superior abilities, His zeal for knowledge amounted to a pas-military life. His death, while the son was sion. He was awake to every new discov- but yet a child, devolved upon his mother ery, and he was as ready to impart as he the responsibility of his education, and was avaricious to gain knowledge on all nobly was that re-ponsibility sustained. the subjects which belonged to his depart Spared, like himself, to more than fourment of study. To fit himself for the part score years, she maintained to the last the for which he was selected while yet a tutor in college, by the sagacity of President dignity of a Roman matron, combined with Dwight, he resorted first to Philadelphia record which the son has left of her, writthe simple faith of a Christian. This is the and then to Great Britain, and placed himself under the most competent instructors.

*Life of Benjamin Silliman, M.D., LL. D., late Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology in Yale College. By George P. Fisher, Professor in Yale College. In two volumes. Charles Scribner & Co.

ten after her death:

"She cherished a cheerful confidence in her Saviour, and looked at death without dismay. She told me after her recovery (from one of her attacks) that she had no fear of death, and was ready and willing

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